WMD: Writer, Mother, Dreamer

Category Archives: Inspired Home Office Blog

My first experience with the series of Inspired Home Office solutions was traveling through The Wish Kit workbook. Over the last several weeks I have done the exercises and writing prompts provided and found it a remarkable help to me. I was taught to unclutter my mind (and heart) so I could see my own vision and reclaim any space as my own.

“Make friends with reality”

The words leap off the page of Jen’s Wish Kit. I find myself wanting to laugh out loud. Friends with “not perfect”? If I accept the current state of organized confusion, doesn’t that mean I am wimping out? Don’t I have to identify clutter as the enemy and KILL IT DEAD?!?

Finding this out now, after I have already applied the warrior’s face paint is, well, more than a little AWKWARD!

When I started reading The Wish Kit, I had pretty clear intention of what I was expecting to achieve. I would create one of those home offices like the ones featured in the Pottery Barn catalog. I would prove to myself once and for all that I am more JK Rowlings and less Pig Pen from the Peanuts. I would prove that I AM NOT A MESS!

But like most things in my life, it is hard for me to begin at the beginning. I get lost in the hugeness and overwhelmed, followed quickly by resignation to defeat. It is about this time that being organized is something for “them” but not for me. Over and over, for the better part of my life, this has been my pattern. But today is a new day.

Rather than trying to eat the elephant in just one bite, I asked Jennifer Hofmann for advice on where I should start. She suggested I should start by reading her eBook on organization entitled, The Wish Kit. After reading just one page I understood why she guided me in this way.

“Even as a child I was a whirling dervish in both thought and deed. My mom had another way of describing it. To her I was simply a “mess.” Based on her Southern-Christian-Ladylike upbringing, being disorderly was “bad.” Cleanliness is next to godliness and her unkempt little girl was headed to hell in gasoline undies.

Her mission was to teach me how to stop spontaneously combusting into tornadoes of paper. She focused on the paper and never saw the purpose.

The disheveled piles of paper were my attempt to have my voice heard in this world. It was me being free.”